The other night I couldn’t sleep, and so I came downstairs. My son happened to be curled up on the couch rather than in his room. At the orphanage the TV was a luxury, something you had to sneak stolen encounters with, usually after dark. We had rules for screen time, but here he had snuck out of his room, now having fallen asleep in front of the glow of the screen.
In this moment I found myself looking at my son and wondering about what I had to offer him as his father. I wondered about all the things I wanted to promise him would be true about his new life here as part of this family. I thought about his hopes and dreams. And I thought about all the ways this world can steal these promises, these hopes and these dreams.
And then I just started to write. And what came out was this series of questions:
The Meaning of a Life
The moment we discover gravity is the moment we realize that we cannot fly. And so we learn how to crawl, and then we learn how to walk.
The moment we learn to walk is the moment we learn to die. And so we begin the work of learning what it means to live.
But what is life if not the slow process of dying?
And so we choose to believe that the inevitability of death gives life meaning.
But if death gives life meaning, why do we spend our lives trying to find a way to oppose it? We work and we give and we fight so that we can respond to tragedies and believe that someday we might conquer disease and do away with war. We could not imagine a public request for money to help fund a cure for cancer while also hearing that this same cancer cannot or should not be cured on the grounds that it somehow gives life meaning.
We hope for more. We hope for better. We hope that one day life can and will change. This is human nature. To live life we must face death. To define a life however, it seems we must be able to define death. Otherwise we lose all basis for understanding and seeking after what it means to actually live.
What kind of world, then, what kind of life do we expect to find on the other side of death and disease and doom scrolling visions?
What motivates us to long for life in this world seemingly governed by death?
What motivates us to simultaneously strive to imagine what is wrong in this world being made right when it is often difficult and sometimes seemingly impossible to justify such investments against the dominating forces of death? And what about the even more difficult question: can such matters ever be rationally explained in the first place?
Which begs another question: how do we distinguish between matters of longevity and matters of meaning? Can we say that these are the same things? And if not, what is it that I am passing along to my son, what is it that I am investing into my son that has the power to say, this is what truly matters and here is why?
And so we find ourselves seeking such motivation by constantly affording certain things a degree of eternal significance they cannot claim for themselves. We have kids. We build companies. We build a list of accomplishments. We chase after a plethora of societal measures that tell us whether we belong or not. We seek happiness. We imagine dreams. We invest in the lives of others.
And as we go along we tell ourselves that life is about coming to learn that we are not at its center.
Perhaps the biggest thing to be afforded that degree of eternal significance is this western construction of progress that we then place on the shoulders of the emergent generation. Go out into the world, we say. Change it. Make a difference. Do your thing until you come to the point where the world will begin to gradually erase you and your accomplishments from the picture.
Or at least this is what it might say if it could speak honestly.
Here I am reminded of that important philosophical observation that what we are able to say about ourselves matters precisely because it determines what we can honestly say about another. How we view ourselves matters to how we are able to view the world.
And where the world starts to tell us otherwise? Where our societal measures write a different narrative? That’s the point of crisis.
Of course, as we all intuitively feel and know and recognize to some degree, for every moment that we try to pick ourselves up and live, death presents us, again and again, with that realized existential crisis. Followed by yet another article reminding us that all these efforts to construct eternal signicance are really just a biologically constructed need to belong and to matter.
How then do we convince others to live if we cannot trust ourselves? What are we helping others to live for if life remains indistinguishable from death?
And if I manage to arrive at some rational, coherent definition that allows me to locate a life in this world, how do I teach my son to truly long for this world as something true and coherent rather than falling into the trap of believing we must construct, or allow society to construct, our own eternal significance in order for it to matter?
Watching my son in a dead sleep leaves me with this deep sense of restlessness. The only thing I know for certain is that the struggle is real, and the struggle is a necessary starting point for such weighty matters as holding responsibility for a life. What I also know is that all manners of my own actions in the coming years will play a role in handing my son messy and complicated and even harmful measures of worth and meaning despite my own efforts to do otherwise. I know this because this is how ever parent-child relationship works.
But I also hope that beyond that assured convinction (that I will play a role in messing my kid up) that maybe there is a greater revelation to be found along this journey as well. Here I begin to shift my thoughts towards a picture of what it might be to consider the witness of my kid teaching me what it means to live from my own vantage point. Teaching me how to define a life. Maybe one part of that revelation could be that the way to learn how to strip off the weight and find something more true underneath the complicated mess will be figuring out how to allow this responsiblity to free me of my own baggage.
And if grace be found anywhere, perhaps this is where our story can begin to seek a better one for both of us. A truer one. A story that we can bind ourselves to and which can give us meaning.
A Marriage Analogy
First we enter the Honeymoon period where anything is possible. Love is ours for the taking. This new world is an enchanting and wondrous place. Romance is very much alive and well. Everyday is made up of big, extraordinary moments.
We believe we can fly.
And then reality sets in.
Routine. Struggle. Conflict.
Innocence lost.
Which presents us with an opportunity.
We must learn to walk. We grow through the struggle. We find meaning in the routine. We come to cherish the small moments in the midst of what is sometimes an overwhelming sense of conflict. We realize that one day this romance will be stolen, one day death will take its toll.
And then, where we come to that realization we learn to live.
Not just live, but we also learn to live for more.
The reason we walk is to remind ourselves of what it was like to fly. We spend the rest of our lives trying to reclaim the wonder and the romance that the world stole and continues to steal away. In the midst of this reality- the routine, the struggle, the conflict, we find ways to fall in love over and over and over and over again.
Where reality steals, we work to give it defintion
Because in giving we are able to let them know that they mean something to us.
But in the giving we don’t construct, rather we discover. We learn to believe in something that exists beyond circmstance and measure.
We learn to hope.
We hope for more than til’ death do us part. We hope for new life.
